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Notes -
Every month in our office canteen, a member of the HR team hangs up posters on the noticeboard of notable days or commemorations which fall within that calendar month. For July, these included World Friendship Day (July 30th), Nelson Mandela's birthday (July 18th) and World Chocolate Day (today). There's also International Non-Binary People's Day, which it will not surprise you to learn made me roll my eyes (the aforementioned member of the HR team had only just taken down the innumerable pride flags festooning the office for the duration of June, but apparently we need an extra day outside of that just for the they/thems). But what interested me was that International Non-Binary People's Day falls on July 14th, the same day as Bastille Day. There's an implicit hierarchy here, wherein the HR department are tacitly insinuating that non-binary people deserve international commemoration in a way that French people don't.
Now consider this HR person is making a middle- to high-tier salary to spend his or her time looking through Wikipedia's monthly holiday lists, making the poster in Microsoft Office, preparing and printing copies, and placing them around the office. Meanwhile, the AI recruiter bot is busy filtering hundreds of applicants submitted for the ghost job meant to pump up the numbers for the HR person's quarterly quotas.
In May, he hung up a poster advertising World Potato Day, saying that it fell on Thursday, May 30th. I very politely pointed out to him that May 30th falls on a Friday this year. I was legitimately annoyed about this - I'm not saying you have one job, but this responsibility of yours is a profoundly easy one, and you still managed to fuck it up?
Take comfort in knowing he had to trash all the posters he put up, fix the typo, then print and hang the posters again.
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